there was a comparison done on the Hot Fuzz DVD and HD-DVD. The HD-DVD looked much better, and had 18hrs of extras, so Blu-Ray will be about the same. However, it might be a little better because of the increased capacity.

The media being displayed from a blu-ray player, or hd-dvd player should be exactly the same, if you use HDMI. (I'm pretty sure that remains digital).

If you copied the HD-DVD, or blu-ray to your hdd, and "played" it, it would be exactly the same, too.

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Are you sure there aren't different CODEC's associated with the different formats. I think the differences are BOTH storage media AND codec (and encryption). However, since they were both designed for HD video quality, I would imagine they would LOOK as good as each other. The reviews we have heard may only reflect differences in the electronics of the different players being used, and not the underlying quality of the format.

Ofcourse using Divx over xVid is going to give you a different result, but those aren't a specified standard so it will depend on what is used by the producing company.
Neither should be very different at all, though, at this resolution and quality.

Since both formats can use the same codec you get something such as below:

Warner, which releases movies in both formats, often uses the same encode (with VC-1 codec) for both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, with identical results.

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Both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD support the same 3 video compression standards (MPEG-2, VC-1 and AVC). Each of the 3 video compression technologies in use exhibit different bitrate/noise-ratio curves, visual impairments/artifacts, and encoder maturity.

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So it depends on what publisher does it, but if the publisher uses the same codec to make it comparable, storage medium makes NO DIFFERENCE.

For those films that are released on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray the video on the disk is identical. This is because a film studio will not spend many days pointlessly remastering something that doesn't need it. HD-DVD and Blu-ray will look identical when both are taken from a decent source... In fact, since both now use VC1 and H264 most of the time, the codecs reach saturation for their bitrate at about 15GB for video data (2hr movie)...

I actually tend to re-encode my HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks to WMV with 5.1 WMA and onto a DVD9. That way I can playback on my 360 without having to use the HD-DVD drive, and without needing my PS3... The backups are very useful and look identical on my 1080p projector to the originals... They sound fantastic too. WMA 5.1 is awesome.